All right, welcome to Scrapyard Wars,
where Luke and I try to build the best computers we can
with a set of guidelines and a fixed budget.
So this is our first episode.
We're looking for a lot of feedback from you guys
about what we can do to make these fun
and interesting in the future.
But for today's challenge, we are keeping it very simple.
$300 cash, the very best gaming rig
that we can build with a few rules.
So number one is no monitor or other peripherals required.
We only have to build the tower.
No worker research can be pre-done,
so you can't go on websites or Craigslist
and try to find things before or in between.
Each participant gets a total of eight hours
to actually find everything,
and then four hours to build it, tune it, and benchmark it.
I'm not paying any overtime on this,
so we are staying inside those guidelines.
No leveraging friends, social media contacts,
coworkers, or anything of that sort.
Overclocking is allowed.
We'll be measuring performance
of the machines using 3DMark Firestrike,
Tomb Raider 2013, and Dirt 3.
And along with the no peripherals thing,
it's just a tower that you need,
no operating system or anything like that.
So let's get to it, shall we?
Scratch Wars.
Here we go.
You have exceeded your daily transaction limit.
Please take your receipt.
I see.
Declined.
Okay, then.
I'ma go inside.
I have the cashola.
There you are.
Thank you.
All right.
Let's go, shall we?
Good luck.
I should have known he'd never fall for that.
I'm fairly sure he's going to waste time
going back to the office.
I brought a laptop with me,
so I will begin immediately.
I really hope it's charged.
There's a store somewhere in Vancouver.
I think it's called Reboot.
It's a non-for-profit little store thing
that kind of refurbishes computers
and sells computers and does kind of cheap repairs
and stuff for people that need it.
And I think if I can participate in this contest
and support a company that tries to,
like they do really cheap computer repairs
and I know they try to like,
I think they do some charity,
giving computers to people and stuff.
If I can help them out,
get a cheap computer from them
and participate in the contest,
then that's doing many things well at once.
So I'm going to try and see if I can do that.
I'm going to contact them,
figure out what their hours are and go from there.
Now we're rocking.
Here.
Jesus.
All right, so should we start on,
red flag deals used to be a haunt for me.
I used to find a lot of good stuff there.
The line is tech tips, buy, sell, trade.
That Craig's list.
Do you want me to call Anthony?
Ah, oh, that.
No, we're not allowed to leverage friends.
And this is where the like, montage,
montage music has to come in.
Dun, dun, dun, dun.
That might be the best we can do.
And then this guy also had a hard drive for 20 bucks.
Oh, he looks detected.
Does he?
Okay, good.
Excellent.
That means literally nothing.
So an Intel Core 2 Duo with 80 Gigabyte hard drive.
Oh God.
And two gigabytes of RAM for 50 bucks though.
So that leaves me $250 to get a graphics card.
Let me give them a call.
This is why we don't make TV shows.
There seems to be a pretty significant drop in price
once you get to Core 2 Duo range.
So I'm looking for that
because I think that'll be fine for most of the games.
It'll fall behind a bit for sure on a Tomb Raider.
Are they gonna come to concede defeat?
Where are they going?
They're not allowed to take out more money.
Oh, they're trying to film things better
than just pointing the camera at me in the car.
How innovative.
That seems unnecessary.
Whoa.
This could be, oh, is this that same frigging guy?
Well, he has a case.
He has a CX 500 power supply too.
If I hear back from this guy,
I don't think Lou's gonna think to check Kijiji.
Okay, 45.
And then this is a combo.
Ooh, computer cases with power supplies and other hardware.
Phone calls only, please.
All right, here we go.
Hi.
Hi, you have a Craigslist listing
for computer cases with power supplies.
$10 or something.
So do you have anything reasonably new
with a 24-pin power supply
and compatibility for a micro ATX board,
like some kind of standard board,
or is it all gonna be non-standard like Dell HP stuff?
That's an Athlon?
Oh, okay.
That's a little older than I need.
I'm looking for an entry-level gaming PC.
If you can just tell me what CPUs the systems that you have.
I'm very familiar with the hardware.
I know what I'm looking for.
I just need to know what you have.
If you're in contact with somebody
who can help you with the parts you need.
Oh, okay.
That might actually be very helpful.
What's your name?
My name's Linus.
If you wanna build a-
What I'm trying to accomplish is today,
I wanna find my platform.
So everything I'll need.
And then tomorrow, essentially,
I wanna spend the entire time finding
the best possible price that I can on a GPU.
That's like my whole plan tomorrow.
Pick up.
I just found another computer.
Same price, but it's actually $5 cheaper.
It has a 450-watt power supply.
That's probably fine.
Four gigs of RAM.
So that's a slight improvement there.
Four gigs of RAM, that's probably good enough.
And then an E8400 again.
I'm kinda surprised he hasn't just tried to like
leave and go into some little computer shop
and get them to give him a deal because of who he is.
That was my full expectation the whole time.
And then he put up
the rule that we can't use our influence.
I was like, wow.
Because that's exactly what I expected him to do.
So now I'm not sure how he's gonna cheat.
.
I don't even know that he's going to.
Never cheat at all.
You know what we should do?
Is we should look really excited when we pull out
and we should look like we're heading somewhere, okay?
We'll give them a little, a little farewell beep beep.
You know?
I don't even know how to use Craigslist.
First stop is going to be the Salvation Army thrift store.
This isn't a computer.
That was bad.
That was really bad.
I hope Linus' time is not, not going well.
Continue on Langley Bypass 14.
If I just throw the car under a semi, we'll be okay.
We can avoid, we can avoid judgment at the end of the,
at the end of the contest when we have no computer
because there's no computers at thrift shops
and Linus magically found something on Craigslist.
I'm hoping that they don't have like computer-savvy employees.
So they might undervalue a certain tower
compared to another one.
Like they might price two of them at the same price.
And one of them is actually clearly better.
Fingers crossed.
Is this literally?
Is this literally a clothing store now?
You're kicked out anyways.
Hi.
I'm actually contacting a few guys
that are selling computer parts.
May I ask which one?
Dilbert.
Ah, yeah, that's right.
Hi.
I'm just generally looking for everything right now.
I don't have any of the components locked in
and I need to get everything by about midday tomorrow
as a birthday presents.
What would we be looking at for something like a Q60,
600 and a board?
Oh, something like that.
It's like $80.
Still leaves me needing, I don't know.
I don't know.
A case power supply.
Do you have any like super cheapo, stupid stuff?
Yeah, a case and power supply.
Okay, I'm not worried about the case looking great.
He doesn't see real well.
Well, I can throw the power supply and case into the 200.
For the 200?
You know what?
I will call you back before the end of your shop time today.
So I'll call you back in the next hour or so.
And I'll let you know if I'm gonna come by tomorrow morning
and pick this stuff up.
Sounds like this might be the deal that helps me out here.
All right, thank you very much.
Take care.
Maybe it was worthwhile
to listen to that life story after all.
We might've just gotten everything but a video card
with a hundred dollar budget for a graphics card leftover.
Okay, but that might be like plus tax
because this is-
Oh no.
Well, let's hope it's not.
I got an email back from the guy
that I actually wanted to respond the most.
This was the guy with the E8400
that had four gigabytes of DDR3 as well
and the 500 Gigabyte hard drive.
It's not the greatest price, but that's an option.
He's available right now,
which is good.
So I need to figure out if I can get a,
what I can get for a graphics card for 220 bucks.
If I can get something good enough,
which I think I can,
I think I'll go with it.
Linus speaking.
Yes, I did.
Oh, hi, hi.
I, okay, I gotta be upfront with you.
I can't leverage being me as a negotiation strategy.
So you have to pretend that I'm not who I am.
So I don't need a water-cooled card.
I need an air-cooled card,
which means that since I don't have any budget left over
for the rest of the system,
I pretty much have to get an all-in-one liquid cooler
for $100 minus whatever I pay for your card.
So that's where I'm at.
I have got no leads on an all-in-one liquid cooler
and I have to have this done by the end of the day tomorrow.
Is there now?
Is there?
I see that.
That would be just like an extra dollar, like 20, 20.
Yeah, can you do 80?
Yeah, I guess I could, yeah.
Okay, can I pick it up today or tomorrow?
Can I come tomorrow morning?
You're in Richmond, correct?
In Burnaby, actually.
You're in Burnaby.
I think I'm gonna be in Burnaby anyway.
Like I'm doing a bit of computer hardware
pickup stuff tomorrow.
So I will be, I'll be around.
So tell you what, why don't you just pick somewhere,
somewhere safe near wherever it is you live,
like a Starbucks or whatever.
And then just let me know.
You've got my number.
So if you just text me the address
and what time works for you,
I'll be there tomorrow morning.
Okay, all right, thank you.
That would be no problem.
All right, take care.
Okay, we have secured a GTX 580 for $80.
If they can get a slightly faster CPU
than us, like maybe an 1155 core i5 quad core,
something along those lines,
even if they have a slightly lesser video card,
they might still come out ahead.
If they get a similar video card, better CPU,
then we're in real trouble.
But basically this is gonna,
I need to make sure our power supply has support
for GTX 580.
That's a pretty power hungry card.
I wonder what they're up to.
Hopefully spinning their wheels, finding nothing.
All right, so I got the computer.
Everything works.
He booted it up for me.
I got to inspect everything.
It's fine.
I didn't haggle them down anymore.
So I got it for 80 bucks, which I think is fine.
We'll have to see what Linus got,
but that seems like an okay deal
for an 8400 computer to me.
The inside is really nice and clean.
So I was happy to see that.
It looks like he took good care of it
or at least took good care of it right before I got there.
Not entirely sure which one, but anyways.
Kind of baller RAM.
I didn't expect this.
Okay, maybe not actually baller,
but it's gold plated.
Well, not really gold plated,
gold painted OCZ memory,
which I thought was kind of funny.
There's the E8400.
The fan, CPU fan and everything
is in immaculate condition, which is great.
Let me get this back in here.
One quick second.
I thought it was kind of funny
the optical drive isn't even hooked up,
but I wouldn't use it anyways.
So the power supply though
is kind of like the most sketchy balls thing ever.
It's a Powerlink 450 watt.
But yeah, I don't know.
No PCIe power whatsoever.
There's two molexes though,
so I can adapt her off for that.
So I don't know.
We'll just kind of have to see.
So this will be my base platform.
I'll see if I need to get a new power supply
and then yeah, we'll go from there.
This is really awkward
because I've just made appointments
with our GTX 580 water cooled card
and our cooler for it,
which are totaling a hundred dollars.
But someone just accepted it.
Our offer for a hundred dollars on a 7950.
So I'm going to do a little bit of research
into overclocking the 580 and overclocking the 7950,
but I'm going to feel like a real bad dude,
but I might have to bail on those guys
and take the better offer.
The problem is that now I have to go get it tonight,
which means I might have to take like the kids with me.
So.
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So did we decide about going to get things tonight?
I can't.
Well, that's very interesting then.
I have a call to make.
Also, you can't do any more Craigslisting stuff
after six.
You're cheating already.
I'm not cheating.
What are you doing right now?
Replying to a message.
There was a, okay.
I had to, I had, no, I had to do other stuff.
I've been back here for a bit.
I had to like record a voiceover and stuff.
No, have I been here?
Have I been working?
Is there, is there actual?
Oh, I don't know Linus.
See, oh, Terran's agreeing with me.
Wow.
Dicks.
Hey Linus, Terran's got that big 4K monitor.
Can I have that now?
No.
This isn't 4K.
And that's not 4K anymore.
Sorry, I can't come down to get anything tonight.
So I might have to pass.
If anything changes, I will,
I will give a call tomorrow to, to let you know.
If it comes to that, then,
if it's not too much to ask,
maybe take the card out with you
and I could come to you wherever you happen to be.
Cause it's a bit of a scavenger hunt situation
I've got going on.
Thanks.
My number is 310-1010 Pizza Hut.
Good night.
There.
I'm done for the night.
There.
It's all I'm doing tonight.
Next time on Scrapyard Wars,
Linus gets a tetanus shot,
Luke gets mugged,
and Nick fights a dingo.
I know, stick off you bloody dingo.
Uh, none of that actually.
Uh, none of that actually. Uh, none of that actually. Uh, none of that actually. Uh, none of that actually.
happens.
Or does it?